IBM has today announced the findings of a report on the economic benefits of implementing smart technologies in the hope of backing up its pleas
for the government to invest more money in the sector.

IBM Australia chief Glen Boreham (Credit: IBM)

"I think the stimulus package has addressed the ills of past:
roads, rail, school maintenance [...] it's
addressed the present in terms of the $900 or so immediate cash
injection," IBM managing director Australia and New Zealand Glen
Boreham said today at the company's offices in St Leonards, Sydney.
"There is a chapter that I think is being written, and that is the
future."

Boreham praised the government's commitment to the National
Broadband Network and its
investment of $100 million in smart
grids, saying it would provide a tangible proof point for
Australians which they would understand. "This isn't intellectual
or it's not Denmark, this is Australia and it's real," he said.

He believed that investment was a great starting point, but he wanted to see more of it focusing on economic benefits of smart technologies in transport, electricity, health, irrigation and broadband. Boreham also hoped that the report, which IBM commissioned Access Economics to write, would provide factual backing.

The report maintained that going smart in those areas could
cause a 1.5 per cent increase in GDP over 10
years as well as create 70,000 extra jobs to the economy in 2014
alone.

The report looked at scenarios where $3.2 billion was spent on
smart grid technology, $200 million spent on water irrigation
technology in the Murray-Darling Basin, $6.3 billion on integrated
electronic health records, an undefined investment in transport
technology, and $12.6 billion on a fibre-to-the-node network.

"I think these are well-grounded estimates that are large enough
for us to take forward and demonstrate that smart systems warrant
active policy attention from the government," Boreham said.

IBM, along with other industry bastions, had been lobbying for
more of the government's infrastructure spend to become technical.
Boreham believed the industry had obtained some success with, for
instance, making new school buildings and hospitals wireless and
with trying to make sure that tenders go out with technology
requirements.

According to IBM's director for government relations Kaaren
Koomen, the government "gets it" but is struggling with its
time frames with delivery. Innovative infrastructure had to be
delivered as fast as the dumb infrastructure.

Boreham said he agreed with Communications Minister Stephen
Conroy's idea of mandating smarts such as telemetry and sensors be
built into infrastructure.

"A smart infrastructure clause being mandatory in all physical
infrastructure projects is very sensible," he said. "Without naming names,
we've had discussions with Infrastructure Australia and they've
openly acknowledged that their focus is on the physical. Their
focus is roads and rail and then there's a brick wall and then
there's the digital infrastructure debate about broadband and
datacentres and devices and the two aren't coming together."

According to Boreham, Conroy is on side, but there is further
work to get the message out to agencies and the general economic
debate.

Boreham admitted that the industry probably hasn't been as
ruthless as it needed to be on the political side of things,
pointing to successful lobby groups such as the automotive
manufacturing industry.

"Has the IT industry done enough? I don't think we have, if I
compare our industry to others ... we've been a lot more subtle
traditionally. We need to be more direct. That's one of the reasons
we decided to build some data."

When asked about IBM's personal stake if it successfully gained
the government's ear on smart technology, Boreham said there was no
data as to how much the company stood to gain, but said it was
certainly a source of revenue.

He said IBM was already
involved in a number of government projects and that it would be tendering for the smart grid work.
"There are business opportunities for us and we're not going to
tell you there's not," he said.